Riverwise – Magazine – Writer Artist – Sponsorship

the project

Riverwise Magazine is a collective effort to highlight and strengthen grassroots movement activity throughout the city of Detroit. Former staff members of the Michigan Citizen Newspaper alongside active members of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center for Nurturing Community Leadership launched the magazine in 2017 with an eye towards reporting on emerging movements, especially among communities of color.

Riverwise documents the people and places building a more equitable and just city. While government agencies lay down the red carpet for billionaire venture capitalists and corporate ‘tech’ headquarters, Detroit’s ‘underserved’ are projecting visions of a sustainable future.

With a distribution of 10,000 copies a quarter, we are encouraging new ways of thinking about our city in coffeehouses, barbershops, community centers and bookstores. Our work has been supported by a generous grant from the New Visions Foundation and individual donations. We anticipate being able to maintain the current level of funding for basic production for the coming year but we have depended on the volunteer work of authors and artists.

We are now calling on you, our growing readership, to help us support local writers and artists working with us to tell these remarkable stories. Their unique insights and abilities are essential to projecting new ideas and propelling us towards a more humane world.

Our commitment to expand the traditional role of a community publication is paramount to the mission of Riverwise magazine. We provide an independent, visionary voice about the challenges facing our city and our country. This campaign is one step towards aligning our funding structure with the communities we seek to engage.

the steps

Riverwise will use your donation to support writers and artists. We will broaden our call for submissions’ to writers and artists and offer a stipend for published work.

These stipends will be allotted according to our quarterly publishing schedule which currently falls in the first week of months, February, May, August and November.

We will also encourage visionary activists who don’t consider themselves ‘writers’ in the traditional sense to develop stories based on their activism within grassroots communities.

why we’re doing it

Within many Detroit communities, activists are struggling to cope with a myriad of state-induced crises. Water shut-offs, rampant mortgage and tax foreclosures, school closures and other injustices have ravaged historically stable neighborhoods.

The response by local government support has been to continue providing tax breaks and other advantages to the wealthy in a fevered attempt to quickly inject investment into specific, favored regions in the city. Neighborhoods that need support and the most have been left to fend for themselves. Drawing on a history of “making a way out of no way,” people are developing visionary solutions to not only survive, but thrive in a city based on values of compassion and care. Documenting these stories is critical to expanding the consciousness of everyone about the kind of changes we need to create a better future. With your help, we hope to support for writers and artists who have dedicated their lives to telling the stories of people making a real difference in our communities.

Riverwise has initiated this campaign to help support writers and artists who have engaged in fighting these issues directly, or have committed themselves to telling the stories of those who have responded with visionary and empowering programs.